W/B 21st November 2011

This week has been taken up with a range of meetings, external examining and the presentations on the research development day and other sessions. The academic team, Tom and Sara on Monday discussed some future proposed research on the MA Academic Practice. On Tuesday I was external examining at the Open University for the day.

Wednesday was the research development day and Professor Paul Curran opened the day and Jo Bradford provided the plenary session on the “REF”. The remainder of the day was focused on sessions about working with your supervisor effectively, preparing for your Viva, presenting at a conference, writing for academic purposes and qualitative data collection and analysis to name a few. The final session was three students presenting their experiences of being a PhD student. There is a formal evaluation of the day but anecdotally those I spoke to said they had enjoyed the day and found it useful.

Thursday Keri, Annemarie and I had budget meetings and a meeting about the move in our office with space being increased for ADU and some reduction for us. Those who are being moved round are the support and academic team and all know but bear with them at the end of next week when their computers are off for a day and they are being moved across the office. Other than that I did a session for Andy and Sian on the learning, teaching and assessment module and met with two students from the programme. On Friday I had sometime to catch up on the weeks e-mails and then did a sessions on for the LDC research and journal club on ethics and then again a brief session on the dissertation module for Patrick on ethics. I ended the week by peer reviewing a statistics class which was good and I learnt something too.

W/B 14th November 2011

Monday and Tuesday I had a range of meetings with various staff across the University.

Wednesday I attended Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG) net work of all Heads across the UK. There was a presentation at this about student engagement and how to include them in enhancement from Bath University. This was interesting and led to a lot of discussion about how students now want to be partners in their learning. There are some really interesting projects going so Bath are running a student scheme of shadowing senior managers in the University so they understand their role too and Exeter University now have students on lecturer appointment panels and on University finance committees really interesting.

There was then a discussion around the revised UKPSF and how now there was a clear Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow route. This led to discussion about how HESA will ask in March/April of next year for institutional data on who is a qualified lecturer and who has HEA fellowship as academics etc although this will not published in 2012 but will be in 2013. Lots of places now starting to explore this we have not but I will add this to list of keeping an eye on and discuss with HR how data might be possible to collect through the academic CV if this goes into a database.

There was also a discussion about HEDG having got one of the JISC digital literacies bids and how this was to explore how Heads contributed to this in their institution. There was a debate about what this really means and several definitions are now around.

The afternoon finished with Gina Wisker feeding back on the follow up research that has been done on Educational Centres furthering David Gosling’s earlier work.

Thursday and Friday I was at the SEDA Autumn conference both presenting but also as the now co-chair of the conference committee which I took over on May 2011. You can all see some of the conference presentation notes from both Olivia and myself on the conference blog.